Yes, my heart sank when I first heard Thomas Wehner say that his aim was to turn Occupy into "a global brand: one message, one logo, one feel".

Wehner is in his early 40s, a marketeer, social entrepreneur and active in Occupy Money in Frankfurt. I met him earlier this week on the top floor of the Galeria Kaufhof, a coffee shop with great views of the Frankfurt stock market and all the shiny glass skyscrapers. He had come with Hajo Köhn, a food and children's education consultant in his late 50s who founded Occupy Money Frankfurt. The third was Occupy Money's communications guy, a cheerful retiree who signs off his emails with "mit occupierenden Grüßen, Thomas Occupy".

So my heart sank when I first thought of Occupy as "a global brand". If yours did too, you can ask Wehner all about it because he is happy to respond to you in the comments.

But Wehner has a compelling case, which perhaps Köhn summarised best: "We need to go mainstream." The initial Occupy movement has had fantastic success in capturing the world's attention, he says. But it has remained a marginal phenomenon, and in many cities it has broken up into different factions. In Frankfurt there's now Occupy the camp, Occupy Frankfurt and Occupy Money – and you can tell from the way my three interlocutors talk about the other factions that amid all the "great respect" there are very real tensions.

Let's not go there. Instead consider Wehner's analogy: "Occupy must become like Greenpeace. A global player that the mainstream can support, with small monthly donations, with their time, or by joining a demonstration."

The time is ripe, they all believe. Thomas Occupy says: "People in Germany still have far too much trust in their banks. They think the bank wants what's best for them." At the same time the three detect widespread disillusion among financial insiders: "The short-termism is nearing its end. One of our people is a top banker. He says he really doesn't want to live in a gated community. He doesn't want to send his children to some exclusive school. He doesn't want his society to become more like America."

It's important to realise that Occupy emerged in the US in response to specifically American circumstances. For one, Germany does not have the same gap between the ultra-rich and the rest. "In our Rhineland model it's not between the 1% and the 99%," he says. "It's a nice slogan but there is a middle class in Germany. This is about protecting the middle class from finance."

Also, he says, Occupy's assembly model of decision-making doesn't work. "It's naïve. We need to accept that there are people who will to try to sabotage what Occupy is doing, and by having this ultra-democratic decision-making process, that's what you get."

Another example of a typically American feature that didn't travel well to Frankfurt was the way Occupiers would repeat what the person in front said – a way to avoid illegal megaphones and still reach those in the back. Says Thomas the communications guy: "People here in Frankfurt were going: what are they doing? Is this a church?"

Occupy Money Frankfurt is working with economists, professors, lawyers, experts and anonymous financial insiders to build up expertise. It is also hoping to stage high-profile actions on the model of Greenpeace. One idea is to offer a prize for whistleblowers. "Think of how Greenpeace captures the world's imagination with its spectacular actions at sea," says Wehner. "We need undercover people inside the banks who can reveal what's really going on there."

Says Köhn: "Frankfurt is going to be the centre of European-wide regulation and banking supervision. Many bankers will be able to go over to the other side and become regulators. Frankfurt can become the centre for sustainable finance."

In a sense Wehner himself is a good example of what Occupy as a mainstream brand could bring about. "In my 20s I was pretty conservative, the sort of person who in the UK would read the Times. I was working as an advertising consultant for a big multinational corporation and we would laugh at the Green party and call them the sock-knitters.

"Slowly I changed. This spring Occupy held a six-months anniversary, and I took my wife and kids there. Everyone brought some food. It was quite lovely. A newspaper took a picture of my family, and the next day five or six people in our neighbourhood came up to me and said: great that you're doing this. It occurred to me just how strong the support is among middle-class people.

"By now I am really engaged. I want to help turn Occupy into a global brand, and I am convinced it can be done."

• Put your own question or comment to Thomas Wehner and he will respond below